• by February 2, 2001

By Ken Liebeskind

When it comes to auditing newspapers, the Audit Bureau of Circulation is top dog, auditing all major dailies. But when it comes to smaller papers, there are other players in the game.

Circulation Verification Council, a nine-year-old firm in St. Louis, audits over 1,000 community weeklies and free shopper papers. It conducts annual audits of each paper that determine printing, distribution and circulation: the number of papers that are printed, distributed to stores and vending machines and actually claimed by readers.

If papers are delivered to homes or mailed, the audit also determines the number of people who receive them on a regular basis.

Publishers pay for the audits, which is the reason many small papers weren't audited in the past. They couldn't afford it. But that is changing now, with newspaper associations often paying for audits for their member papers, according to Tim Bingaman, president of CVC. "Half of our revenue is derived from associations," he says.

Among them is Midwest Free Community Newspapers, a group of 141 papers based in Iowa City, IA that began using CVC last year. "Before that they weren't audited," said Brian Gay, executive director of MFCN, except for a few papers that paid for their own audits. The problem with unaudited papers is they can't sell advertising to major advertisers, which demand audited circulation data. "For a long time we tried to attract the attention of media buyers and agencies, but when they asked about audits we said 'no'," Gay says. "To secure the advertising we needed to play by their rules so we purchased audits for all of our members."

The audits were a success, leading to $200,000 in advertising sales in the past eight months, about half the association's total, Gay says, and "it will keep increasing as word gets out."

Another benefit of buying audits on behalf of an association is that it promotes group advertising buys. Bingaman says advertisers can buy all the papers in an association or clusters of papers in a market area based on the information in an audit, which provides data on each paper in an identical format. "It's the first time this kind of data was ever available," he says.

Advertisers like to buy this way because they can pay one bill for the entire buy, which saves time.

While all audits provide the printing, distribution and circulation information Bingaman mentioned, they can also provide demographic information on newspaper readers. CVC provided that service for MFCN, performing 46,217 phone interviews with newspaper readers. The number of interviews must be enough to insure an accuracy level of plus or minus 2.5%, Bingaman says.

The interviews were done during the verification period, part of the normal audit process when readers are asked about their reading habits. Questions about age, income, how long the publication stays in the home and reader buying habits were asked. Buying habit information was the most